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Re: "Doing" Epistemology?
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Greetings,
Epistemology is the study of the possible conditions of knowledge and
the means of acquiring that knowledge (if the two don't collapse into
one another).
It's worth noting that epistemology is not the study of knowledge.
Knowledge is what knowers do or do not have and to say that epistemology
is the study of knowledge implies that studying what people know would
entail that one does epistemology. That cannot be correct otherwise
epistemologists would be like lexicographers so far as their job would
be to catalogue all the instances of knowledge (i.e. they would note
down each thing that was known). And that's why epistemology is the
study of the conditions of knowledge. But even if we listed all those
conditions which were consistently correlated with cases of knowing we
still wouldn't be doing epistemology since there could well be other
conditions which could have been sufficient for knowledge. It is the job
of the epistemologist to disentangle these conditions to identify which
are merely necessary and which are both necessary and sufficient (or
jointly sufficient). Thus the epistemologist is engaging in the study of
the possible conditions of knowledge.
Quite how far one wishes to cast their net will determine the kinds of
knowledge that the epistemologist is interested in. For an
epistemologist might further evaluate their study of such conditions
according to the social and or practical functions that they might
serve. It is not at all clear whether epistemologists are in the
business of describing conditions that they have 'discovered' or simply
proscribing conditions that will satisfy their other theoretical
commitments (for example, the extent to which your conditions rule out
epistemic luck depends greatly on the degree of certainty you require
knowledge to have- or, conversely, for you to have about your knowledge).
My two cents.
Luis.
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